


R&R

by Sylvestris



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 04, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:21:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28960122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/pseuds/Sylvestris
Summary: Jesse comes down with the flu.
Relationships: Mike Ehrmantraut & Jesse Pinkman
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31
Collections: Blue Christmeth 2020





	R&R

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HimsaAhimsa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HimsaAhimsa/gifts).



> Happy Blue Christmeth, HimsaAhimsa!

The party’s long since over, but Jesse’s ears are still ringing. He can’t sleep at all until he tosses a bundle of blankets on his living room floor and makes a bed out of them. He doesn’t know why; he’s sore in odd places, and his bones just seem to want to be on the floor tonight. Lying on his side in between fitful bouts of sleep he can see all the scuffs on the wall, all the stray Funyuns that his guests’ shoes have ground into the floor. The place smells of cigarettes and stale pizza and sneaker soles. It all feels more or less deserved and appropriate.

Six weeks since he last used, it’s too late for withdrawal, yet his forehead is hot and he feels wrung out like wet laundry. His console and TV are still on. A landing screen plays idly, its neon graphics shifting over and over, burning his eyes when he looks too long, but he lacks the energy to switch it off. It feels like five or six on a bright summer morning, and bars of light are filtering through the windows. Jesse rolls over and tries to shut them out. 

His phone is buzzing. He thinks about reaching for it, but he’s too cold to slip a hand out from under his covers. They’re thick covers. It’s July. He shouldn’t be this cold. Oh, well.

He must have fallen asleep for a while, but his phone’s buzzing again, vibrating against the floor, hurting his skull.

“Yeah?”

“I said I’d pick you up at seven,” says Mike. “Where are you?”

“Shit. Sorry.”

Jesse buries his head in the pillow, planning to snatch another five minutes, but Mike starts banging on the front door. Jesse briefly hates him for making him stand up. He’s hurting all over now; maybe the floor wasn’t such a good idea. He hauls open the door and cringes at the blast of sunlight.

Mike looks him over with obvious disapproval.

“I’m not using,” Jesse says, because being looked down on for something he didn’t even do is just another layer of discomfort. “I’m not hungover, okay? I’m just… I overslept. I don’t know.”

He leans on the doorframe, rubbing his eyes. Mike looks at him with what Jesse takes as dead-eyed disdain, but doesn’t inquire further.

“Go and get dressed.”  


*  


They leave for what Jesse guesses will be another round of dead drops. They both know he doesn’t really need to be there for it, that it’s just Gus’ way of keeping Jesse out of trouble, and that makes it rankle even more. The hot, aching feeling doesn’t go away, it only worsens. Mike’s a smooth, careful driver but the turns he takes make Jesse’s stomach roil. He starts to cough, and he can tell the coughing is annoying Mike, so he tries to swallow the scratch in his throat, wishing he had some water. Maybe if Mike doesn’t actually make him do anything today, just lets him stay in the car while he does the pickups, this will be bearable.

Somewhere in the wastes on the very edge of the city, Mike pulls over for no obvious reason.

“I told you I’d better teach you how to shoot,” Mike says, fetching a bag from the trunk. “Today’s the day.” Unzipping it, he pulls out two guns, two sets of ear defenders, a sheaf of paper targets. Then he pauses, seeing the look on Jesse’s face. 

“Is there a problem?”

Jesse shakes his head. “No. Uh, great. Right on.”

It’s too hot out here. There’s only a t-shirt between his skin and the sun but it might as well be a wool overcoat. If Mike can see how much he’s sweating, he doesn’t say anything; the heat doesn’t seem to bother him at all in his long-sleeved khaki jacket and weird army-type hat. 

“Keep your feet shoulder-width apart,” Mike says. “Interlace your fingers, now pull with your left hand and push with your right.”

“Like this?”

“Mm. Take a breath, focus on your target. Now, don’t pull the trigger. Just squeeze it.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

The bullet clips the edge of the paper target. If it were a person he’d have a slightly grazed shoulder. Jesse stares at it, not looking at Mike. _I had a guy but now I don’t_ , indeed.

“Again.”

The second shot’s no better. The third at least pierces the black of the silhouette’s chest. If that one were a person, he’d have a punctured lung. Jesse feels like throwing up.

“Again.”

Jesse unloads the rest of the clip, just wanting it to be finished, ripping a ghastly hole in the target’s head. “Jesus,” he mutters, putting the gun down and stepping away before he can accidentally shoot Mike or himself. He can smell the incense in Gale’s apartment, hear the steamkettle’s shriek. “Gimme a— gimme a second, wouldja…”

The ground lunges at his knees. He doesn’t pass out, not all the way, but he can’t hear anything but a shrill ringing for a few moments, and when it passes he’s half curled up in the grit and scrub. Mike pushes a bottle of water into his hand and doesn’t let him sit up until he’s drunk from it.

“Better?”

“Yeah,” Jesse croaks, though he’s not. “I’m sorry, man, I don’t know what that was.”

Mike just _hmm_ s at him, eyes narrowed against the sun.

“Get up,” he says, not unkindly, and Jesse hauls himself to his feet. God could kill him on the spot and he’d be thankful. 

“You want me to get back to it?” he asks, dreading the answer.

Mike shakes his head. “You’re in no fit state. I’ll drive you home.”  


*  


Jesse thought he could just stumble out of Mike’s car and back to his makeshift bed to suffer in peace, but Mike, it seems, has other ideas. He follows Jesse to the door and lingers on the threshold, looking around at the state of the place. Well, it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, Jesse thinks, grabbing a blanket off the couch, wrapping it around himself and kicking off his shoes. 

“Thanks for the ride,” he says, awkwardly, settling down on the floor. He’d change back into his boxers, but he can’t decide whether he’s hot or cold, and Mike doesn’t seem to be leaving. 

“Uh, can I help you?” Jesse asks, but Mike is already heading down the hall. Jesse lies back, too tired to object. Let him search the house for drugs or whatever it is he’s doing. 

“There’s nothing in your fridge,” Mike observes, sticking his head around the corner.

“Oh,” says Jesse, guessing that Mike is probably right; it’s been a while since he looked in there. “Yeah, I, uh… yeah.”

It’s quiet for a while and he thinks Mike has gone, but the next time he wakes, Mike is letting himself back in through the front door. The sunlight on the walls has shifted, throwing all the dust on the TV screen into sharp relief. Mike is moving around in the kitchen, unpacking things, perhaps, and although Jesse really doesn’t want to stand up he feels like he needs to see what’s happening in there, in case he’s about to be given another tutorial in gun safety or self defense or how to kill a man with the cap of a ballpoint pen, which is the kind of thing Mike looks like he knows how to do.

All he’s doing is unloading shopping, two heavy bags of it. The generosity of it makes Jesse shrink against the doorframe, scratching the back of his neck.

“Hey, you didn’t have to…”

“Yeah, well,” Mike rasps. He unpacks bread, milk, orange juice, bacon. A bag of greens. Things a normal, functioning person might have in their kitchen. In Jesse’s house, they might as well be alien artefacts.

“Thanks,” Jesse mutters.

“Take these.” Mike tosses him a pack of cold medicine. It’s the tame kind, full of Tylenol and eucalyptus and lemon. “It’ll help your throat. And drink some water. You’re dehydrated.”  


*  


When Jesse was younger it was different, being sick. It was the sweaty creases in his childhood sheets, orange juice burning his throat, the skepticism lining his mother’s face.

“Well, honey, are you sure you’re feeling sick?”

“Why don’t you believe me?”

“I never said I don’t believe you. It’s just that sometimes we all have to do things we don’t feel like doing.”

“You think I’m lying, don’t you?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Jesse.”

The thing is, he does feel sick— and he has an assignment due, shoved crumpled into the outer pocket of his backpack last night, good enough to get him a C at best, and he has math today and his mind has never worked the right way for math no matter how hard he tries. And he does try. He does. No one ever gets that. Why doesn’t anyone get that?  


*  


Jesse tries to go back to sleep, but as soon as he lays his head down his phone vibrates in his pocket. Great, it’s him. With a terrific effort he pulls it out and answers.

“Yeah?”

“Jesse, where are you? We should’ve started an hour ago.”

“Sorry,” Jesse mumbles, laying flat with his cheek against the floorboards and staring at dust bunnies. What makes them ball up like that? Dust is just dust and then somehow it goes into those little like cloud things. Is it static electricity? It’s the kind of thing that Mr. White could probably yammer on about for hours, but Jesse doesn’t have the energy to ask or to listen.

“Are you with Mike?”

“Yeah, actually, I am.” It’s easier than calling in sick— even if Mike allows him to do that, Mr. White sure as hell won’t— and not technically a lie either.

Mr. White huffs into the phone. “Am I to take it that you aren’t going to be joining me for this cook?”

“I guess not.” Mike is still here, puttering in the kitchen, up to something. 

“Jesse, what is it you think you’re being paid for here? Because I am at a loss, I really am.”

“Sorry, I, uh… I gotta go.” He snaps the phone shut, and for good measure, turns it off. Mr. White will be mad at him later, of course. He might even come round and yell at him in person. Whatever.

“You awake?”

Jesse props himself up, and Mike hands him a brimming bowl of soup. Pho from the Vietnamese place two blocks away, it looks like. It’s full of chicken and greens and the smell of it makes him feel actual hunger for the first time in days. It’s an actual meal, not the last slice of two-day-old pizza, not an energy bar found scrunched up inside a jacket pocket. When was the last time someone prepared an actual meal in here? 

“You’ve got a nice house,” Mike remarks. He doesn’t say it loudly, but it cuts the silence so sharply that Jesse’s head aches.

“Uh, thanks,” Jesse says. “It was my aunt’s.”

“Yeah?”

If Aunt Ginny could see it like this— if she could see him like this— he doesn’t want to know what she’d think. It fills him full of the useless urge to make the place nice again. 

Jesse used to cook for Aunt Ginny, of course. Towards the end there was a lot of oatmeal and apple sauce, but back when she had the stomach for actual meals he’d serve up a mean breakfast burrito, real sharp green chiles and all. Fresh fruit and vegetable smoothies, too, because he’d read that they were full of cancer-fighting antioxidants. Steamed brown rice with avocado and pumpkin seeds. A birthday cake, once. He got the quantities wrong so it was a flat, dense disappointment but Aunt Ginny told him she loved it and ate three slices.

Jesse’s eyes water, and he sets down his bowl. Mike is looking at him, he knows, but he can’t bear to look back; he just sits there, staring at the pattern on his blanket, biting his lip and trying not to sniffle.

Mike sits down on the recliner, picks up the remote and clicks it, making the game menu disappear. _INPUT 1_ , it says in the top left-hand corner of the black screen. “Input one,” he repeats. “How do I get an actual channel?”

“Uh, you gotta… it’s the red button. It says AV or something.”

A baseball game fills the screen. Satisfied, Mike sits back and cracks open a beer.

“Eat your soup.”


End file.
